Poetry and Poets

Chronology of Coverage

Feb. 16, 2015

Philip Levine, United States poet laureate from 2011 to 2012 who was best known for work exploring theme of working class strife, dies at age 87; Levine's spare verse, which he often employed in stark social criticism, also won him 1995 Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Awards. MORE

Feb. 16, 2015

Dwight Garner An Appraisal column mourns passing of poet Philip Levine, calling his death serious blow for American poetry; recalls Levine as shrewd and witty communicator who held keen sense of American working-class life. MORE

Feb. 11, 2015

Dwight Garner reviews book From the New World: Poems 1976-2014 by Jorie Graham. MORE

Jan. 30, 2015

Rod McKuen, poet, lyricist and songwriter whose work was shunned by critics but found tremendous commercial success, dies at age 81. MORE

Jan. 26, 2015

Rachel L Swarns The Working Life column highlights the story of Patricia Smith, award-winning poet and English professor who has moved past her troubled career as a journalist for Boston Globe and found a new life in verse. MORE

Jan. 3, 2015

Saturday Profile of Rev Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan poet, revolutionary and mystic who is being celebrated with an anthology of his poems, Ninety at Ninety. MORE

Jan. 2, 2015

Marvin Wexler, hard-boiled commercial litigator skilled at defending commercial clients, pays monthly visits to Sarah Neuman Center, nursing home in Westchester County, to read poetry to senior citizens; Wexler, motivated by past experiences with his own parents, feels that readings are good way to connect with elderly. MORE

Dec. 28, 2014

Nicholas Kristof Op-Ed column presents poems about race written by readers in response to his Whites Just Don't Get It series of columns. MORE

Dec. 24, 2014

Library of Congress announces that it will award 2014 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry to Patricia Smith for her book Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah. MORE

Dec. 10, 2014

Dec. 7, 2014

Nov. 29, 2014

Claudia Rankine book Citizen: An American Lyric, finalist for National Book Award in poetry, conveys sense of urgency about timely and politically charged subjects. MORE

Nov. 23, 2014

Authors Adam Kirsch and Leslie Jamison reflect on how the social role of poetry has changed since Percy Bysshe Shelley. MORE

Nov. 7, 2014

Seventy-nine-year-old J C Barden competes in poetry slams at Nuyorican Poets Cafe against people who are decades younger; says evoking verse keeps his mind occupied and active. MORE

Nov. 1, 2014

Saturday Profile of writer Clive James, who is dying from leukemia, but continues to publish poetry and to work on other projects in writing career that has defied definition. MORE

Oct. 27, 2014

Laugharne Journal; Wales is celebrating 100th birthday of Dylan Thomas, perhaps its greatest poet, who died at age 39 in 1953 and who lived on and off for 15 years in seaside town of Laugharne; in country that has long been ill at ease with its hard-living son, who wrote in English and not Welsh and caricatured his roots as much as he claimed them, Thomas's granddaughter is trying to refocus positive public attention on his work. MORE

Oct. 24, 2014

Cultural center at 92nd Street Y is marking the centennial of Dylan Thomas’s birth with exhibition and revival of his 1953 radio play Under Milk Wood; other Thomas events noted. MORE

Sep. 15, 2014

Publication by Open Road Media of 17 digital collections of John Ashbery's work marks first time bulk of his poetry will be available in e-book form and highlights how digital publishing of poetry has evolved; poetry has proved most resistant to digital technology as most e-readers mangle meticulous formatting, which has caused publishers to hold back on digitizing poetry. MORE

Sep. 14, 2014

Poems created from posts in Craigslist's Missed Connections section highlight erotic aspects of beginning of academic year. MORE

Sep. 14, 2014

Poetry is playing active role in number of current New York City stage productions. MORE

Sep. 10, 2014

Dwight Garner reviews poetry books Gabriel by Edward Hirsch and Once in the West by Christian Wiman. MORE

Aug. 17, 2014

Poems created from posts in Craigslist's Missed Connections section describe amorous encounters in the rain in New York City. MORE

Aug. 9, 2014

Dwight Garner Critic's Notebook asserts that Frank O'Hara poetry collection Lunch Poems, written during O'Hara's lunch hour while he worked at the Museum of Modern Art, remains relevant as it reaches its 50th anniversary; notes that his casual tone was groundbreaking in era of academic verse. MORE

Aug. 2, 2014

Works of Siegfried Sassoon, World War I soldier considered by some to be the most innocent of Britain’s war poets, have been made available online by Cambridge University Library Project; archive showcases 4,100 handwritten pages from Sassoon's notebooks, written near battlefields in northern France. MORE

Jul. 31, 2014

Kit Eaton Appsmart column highlights poetry apps that bring words of grace and life to mobile devices. MORE

Jul. 30, 2014

The PEN American Center announced its annual literary award winners on Wednesday, with a ceremony to follow on Sept. 29. MORE

Jul. 30, 2014

Jul. 28, 2014

Controversy surrounding abrupt resignation of North Carolina poet laureate Valerie Macon highlights proliferation of state poets laureate, and questions concerning exactly what they do; 44 states and District of Columbia currently maintain poet laureate or writer in residence positions, number that has grown rapidly since 1990s; poets often have nebulous official duties, and many have used their position to further political and artistic causes. MORE

Jul. 20, 2014

David Lehman essay reflects on the state of poetry in the age of Twitter; notes that poetry has been pronounced dead many times before, and yet it it still persists. MORE

Jul. 20, 2014

David Orr On Poetry column assesses quality of book Directing Herbert White: Poems by James Franco; considers the book in light of Franco's other achievements; posits that it is in poetry's best interests to have someone like Franco genuinely interested in producing poetry. MORE

Jul. 13, 2014

Poems found in Craigslist's Missed Connections section describe finding love watching Fourth of July fireworks. MORE

Jun. 29, 2014

Jun. 29, 2014

Op-Ed article by writer Brandon Ambrosino recalls his powerful teenage response to reading Walt Whitman's poetry for the first time; notes it provided him with a beautiful vision of 'queer sexuality' that he might not otherwise have found in his conservative and homophobic surroundings; holds the writings of Whitman helped him mitigate his fear of his own homosexuality. MORE

Jun. 19, 2014

Twenty previously unknown poems by Neruda, a Nobel laureate, were discovered by researchers cataloging his manuscripts at the Pablo Neruda Foundation in Santiago, Chile. MORE

Jun. 15, 2014

Op-Ed article by author and poet William Logan argues that dirty secret of poetry is that it is loved by some, loathed by many and bought by almost no one; maintains that idea that poetry must be popular is a mistake; observes that poetry is what language alone can do. MORE

Jun. 12, 2014

Library of Congress will announce Charles Wright as nation's next poet laureate; Wright is the author of nearly two dozen collections of verse that fuse legacy of European modernism with mystical evocations of the landscape of the American South. MORE

Jun. 1, 2014

Jesse Lichtenstein article profiles poet Patricia Lockwood, who finds herself on verge of literary fame after her book Balloon Pop Outlaw Black became the best-selling small-press poetry book of 2013; notes Lockwood's next book Motherland Fatherland HomelandSexuals has been published. MORE

May. 29, 2014

Maya Angelou, legendary author, poet, playwright and activist, dies at age 86; her 1969 book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was among the first autobiographies by a 20th-century black woman to reach a wide readership. MORE

May. 27, 2014

Members of the Dark Room Collective, group of black writers founded in Boston in 1988, have become influential voices in American poetry; their work is less about strife or racial identity than it is about imagination taking wing; boom in African-American poetry is arguably as aesthetically significant as work of Beat Generation, New York School and Harlem Renaissance. MORE

May. 19, 2014

Excerpts from three translations of poem Beowulf by J R R Tolkien and Seamus Heaney featured. MORE

May. 19, 2014

Prose translation of early English poem Beowulf that J R R Tolkien completed in 1926 is being published for first time by Houghton Mifflin under title Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary; Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, was strongly influenced by poem. MORE

Apr. 27, 2014

New York Times readers answer paper's request for haiku poems about city, resulting in 2,800 submissions in 10 days; haikus, brief compositions rife with transitory images, are in many ways reflection of the city itself. MORE

Apr. 6, 2014

Lisa D Mickey Box Seats essay on how poets have reflected on golf’s highs and lows for centuries, using techniques that are central to the game itself; Leon S White, retired MIT professor, who has researched genre around the world, publishes collection Golf Course of Rhymes: Links Between Golf and Poetry, through the Ages. MORE

Apr. 3, 2014

Yahya Hassan, 18-year-old Danish-Palestinian poet, has earned death threats for poetry collection that criticizes Danish welfare state, his family and Danish Muslims at large; collection has ignited both debate and commercial success beyond country's borders. MORE

Mar. 27, 2014

The O, Miami Poetry Festival has devised some unusual ways to flood the city with poetry. MORE

Mar. 23, 2014

Mar. 23, 2014

Ondine Cohane travel article on visiting places in Wales where poet Dylan Thomas was born, wrote and was inspired by bucolic landscapes; notes country is celebrating centenary of his birth with readings, performances and newly mapped trails. MORE

Feb. 17, 2014

Side Street column; New Yorker Gil Fagiani writes poetry that he hopes will connect with people in a way that his political writings could not; he is mining memories of his days as a drug addict after he says he found his calling to help people in recovery. MORE

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